


tie me to a purer movement

by fealle



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Coming of Age, M/M, On-Again/Off-Again Relationship, POV First Person, Post-Graduation, Request Meme
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-07
Updated: 2015-09-07
Packaged: 2018-04-19 14:42:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,867
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4750133
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fealle/pseuds/fealle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>xposted from tumblr. tsukki leaves miyagi in his 2nd year to live in new york, and then comes back to fix things he fucked up back in his high school with a certain captain.</p>
            </blockquote>





	tie me to a purer movement

**Author's Note:**

> original post in tumblr is [here.](http://fealle.tumblr.com/post/128453509072/fic-tie-me-to-a-purer-movement-for-this-anon) the request anon made was: _tsukki fucks up. Surprisingly, kuroo isn’t as quick as you’d think he would be to forgive tsukki. Tsukki’s like woah okay?? and the dynamics of kurotsuki kinda switch up a bit - tsukkis tryna get kuroos attention and make it up to him and apologise and shit and kuroos being uncharacteristically cold and won’t forgive tsukki straight away. eventually he does tho (bc we all love happy endings :))_
> 
> the whole thing is a misunderstanding that gets resolved in the end, but it's more or less a writing exercise in mapping out tsukki's thoughts. as the tags indicate, this entire fic is written in first person - tsukki's POV.

_come home. do you hear?_  
_my lungs are thick with the smoke_  
 _of your absence._

 

 

 

**i.**

My father writes to me, _we will no longer have to be isolated from each other_. He sends this message in a postcard with the New York skyline illustrated at the back, the edges frayed from travel, a crease dividing the postcard where it had once proudly stood straight and stiff, my father’s small and cramped handwriting filling the card with his love to my mother, who is always waiting; to my brother, who is always exasperated; and to me, who is also always waiting, but for something else. His messages to me are always written where the gaps in the postcard could accommodate a personal line to me compared to the novella he writes for my mother.

 

It started with this postcard. My mother’s hands gently turn it over, New York reflected into her eyes, and she muses, “how nice it must be to go to America. You can finish your studies there, Kei.”

 

I run my hands through my hair, the blonde fading at the edges as I purse my lips in reply and say nothing.

 

 

 

**ii.**

In my second year I end up in a relationship with a guy who lives three hours away from Miyagi and has plans for a different future entirely. Where New York spoke of promise to my mother, Kuroo spoke of going to university to further his career - not primarily as a volleyball player, but somewhere where he could pursue his major and his other interests. I am the captain of my team and constantly overworked and overstressed, but this is nothing new among captains, although Ennoshita had accused me of taking things too seriously. And perhaps I have been. Nekoma was just as strong as they had been as i’d remembered it. Seijou hasn’t crumbled with the disappearance of its third years. And Shiratorizawa continues to be a formidable foe. The only thing us crows can do is to keep moving forward, eyes to the sky.

 

Kuroo touches the screen with his forehead and grins.

 

“I’m not sure what you’re doing,” I confessed. He laughs his wild, racuous laugh, and tells me, “it’s a forehead bump, Tsukki. ‘cause I miss you lots.”

 

My family has relentlessly teased me about love and marriage the minute they found out about Kuroo, but the truth is I know nothing about those things. Our relationship is certainly nothing like my parents; the only thing we have in common as a couple is the problem of distance, but three hours is nothing compared to a different timezone entirely. Kuroo’s absence was manageable. What I know about love is that when he’s not around, I feel too lonely, and I wind up tracing his shadow where he used to be on the side of my bed. Things Kuroo doesn’t know, i’ve never spoken to him honestly about the things that embarrass me the most, like how I end up caring all too much while appearing to be a lot more composed than I have any right to be. I am not the easiest to be with. Neither is he. Being in love means that somehow, we make things work and are less lonely for the effort, so perhaps things are getting better.

 

He’s telling me about the new cat his family has decided to adopt and I think of my father’s postcard, a promise in New York, the skyline reflected in my mother’s eyes and my brother updating his resume as he applies to places around Manhattan, Stanford, and I think about planes and ten thousand anxieties I harbor in my mind like a scorpion, carefully nurturing its venom until it was time to let it sting me. I smile and nod to Kuroo where it is appropriate while all the while I wonder when is the appropriate time to tell him that I am leaving. He can’t see my hands where the camera is pointed at my placid face, but I have turned my fingers into an angry red as I mulled my thoughts over.

 

In the evening, the anxiety of leaving destroys me and I am left wide awake, staring at the ceiling at three in the morning, listening to the sound of the wind blowing through the curtains and wondering what goodbyes taste like after they were said; where kindness goes once you turn around and leave.

 

 

 

**iii.**

The problem was not merely a difference in language, but a difference in culture entirely. I know enough about america from my father and from my brother when he goes there for his meetings and conferences but going there, living there is something else entirely. My mother reminds me that we probably have half a year to go considering the time to process the application. The language of forms and visas escape me, what is important is that we make requisite plans in my school considering that the trip - as if it were the kind of trip where one can just easily come back from - will be interrupting my second year.

 

I tell this to Yamaguchi, whose eyes go wide as we talk about living in New York and going to school somewhere in that area and how expensive things must be, and then he asks me, “have you told Kuroo?”

 

I shake my head.

 

“Tsukki, you have to tell Kuroo.”

 

“Of course I will.”

 

But I talk to him every night and somehow the conversation doesn’t come up, and each skype call becomes a deadline that causes my anxiety to go through the roof. I am a good student. I am an excellent volleyball player. But I am somehow inadequate where emotional maturity is necessary, and the feeling of having to move from one continent to another and never have to return to Miyagi is giving me a feeling akin to tar slipping down my throat. Everybody talks about how relationships you make in high school never last, it’s one fairy tale whirlwind after another, and that the natural state of things is to leave what you found in the hallway before it turns into a tumor in the heart you couldn’t excise with a surgical knife if you tried.

 

Kuroo looks at me with too-sharp eyes on the screen, and he asks me, “you’re awfully quiet today.”

 

“… I’m tired,” I lie. “Volleyball practice was more intense than usual - we’re trying out a couple of different routines today.”

 

There are several things to Kuroo’s face, his look, things that I find out from having stared at it too long and having held it in my hands once, at the back of the school, where we shared a kiss - though that seems forever ago. He has a look which tells me he believes everything I say, a humbling, intense look that makes me stammer once the force of its stare is turned on me. And then he has this look, this look that tells me he’s going to do what he can to draw me out of my shell even if it hurts. That’s the look he’s giving me now, the kind that’s waiting for me to expound on my lie or wait until he’s caught a fact inconsistent with my lie, and I am angry at myself for not even trying to say, _I am leaving._

 

All Kuroo says is, “try not to overwork yourself, Kei.” But he says it in his gentlest voice, the one he reserves for me when we’re alone together underneath the blankets and he traces the outline of my eyes with his lips, and I drown in the memory.

 

 

 

**iv.**

The bravest people I know are the ones capable of saying 'good bye.’ Everybody in the team at this point knows about Ennoshita leaving volleyball in the beginning, and how he came back; same with Yamaguchi during the match at Wakunan and coming back with a vengeance in the match against Seijou. I ask Ennoshita to meet me after lunch in the library. It’s important.

 

I’m captain, I am responsible for a team and my vice president. My hands are shivering when he comes, fingers tapping on the table with a staccato beat. “Tsukishima. What’s up?”

 

He sits across me, setting his coffee aside and behind a stack of books to evade the eye of the librarian, and I tell him, in a quiet voice, how I have to leave in six months. Ennoshita bites his lower lip, and then says, “that’s a problem, because I have to leave too.”

 

Oh. “Are your parents moving as well?”

 

“Yeah - business is booming where my dad is in Kyoto, and he’s decided that we’ve got enough funds to get the family moving there.” Ennoshita leans back against his chair. “Damn.”

 

“Our team is talented. Kageyama has changed enough to be able to lead the others. I’m sure Hinata will do a good job supporting him as well. Yamaguchi’s there too.”

 

“Yeah, I know. It’s just - I wasn’t expecting this from you, too.” He laughs softly. “It’s really too bad. I wish we could’ve played more.”

 

“Volleyball’s just a club, Ennoshita. We have the internet and our cel phones to make up for the rest of the time that we’re going to miss.”

 

“I know … I’m being sentimental, I guess.” he sighs. He slumps forward on the table, laying his head over his arms. “What about you? you’re going to be leaving Kuroo, right?”

 

I say nothing.

 

“Sorry, that was a sensitive subject.”

 

“It’s fine. I’m having problems with it myself.”

 

“I understand.” he says sympathetically. “Either way, we’d better tell the coach Ukai soon. I mean … Six months is not enough time to prepare the team to deal with losing their captain and their vice captain at the same time.”

 

 

 

**v.**

Two months pass by and I still haven’t told Kuroo. Kuroo tells me that he’s found a part-time job somewhere near his apartment and he hates it. They constantly cut his hours and his manager is a dick that he has to restrain himself daily from killing, or Bokuto trying to raid his work and causing a ruckus that will hopefully end in a murder. I laugh, but my laughter has a touch of concern. He tells me that he finds university a lot harder than it looks, and for a guy who was a lot smarter than most people give him credit for, there is nothing more devastating than finding out you do badly in a subject you have always believed you excel in. He tells me that his marks in this year had gone from As to B+s and sometimes even Cs, and he’s not sure if it’s the problem of his profs or himself, whether he’s not being more efficient with studying or it’s just general burn out from his job as well, or whatever. He hasn’t been attending volleyball practice for a while as a consequence of trying to make sure his marks are high enough for what’s required of his degree; he has a problem with his phone plan; he wants to destroy his landlord. Akaashi isn’t doing any better; apparently both of them together make for bad roommates, because neither he nor Akaashi know the meaning of rest where studying is concerned. Both of them are barely getting the marks they need for their courses.

 

Kuroo looks - really tired. I am sick with worry over him, and it seems that everything about my life is paltry compared to the litany that he’d just told me, problems i’ve only associated with adults and not with people of my age, and everything about him seems so foreign that I forget, for a moment, that he is my boyfriend. Some day are like this, where looking at Kuroo seems to me like an endless series of comparisons where none of them hold up to what i’ve had in mind about where this relationship is, a toxic thought to someone already stressed over the smallest things. It’s a Friday night, nine in the evening. I just finished my dinner. I ask him, “are you planning on going out tonight?”

 

“Tonight? No, not really. I know Bokuto’s planning to hit the gym and Akaashi’s going to hunt down a pub to get drunk in with a couple of our other friends, but i’m not really in the mood for anything else other than to sleep and I’m pretty sure I’m going to get sick.”

 

“I’m coming over.”

 

That stops him mid-yawn. “- right now?”

 

My fingers turn red in worry as I grip the side of my table. “Yes, right now. Meet me at the station in a few hours.”

 

It’s easy to leave and come back with a train; planes are different. A plane ticket to New York will have to be a one-way ticket. My dad said he’d help me figure out the subways, how to walk around the city without being mistaken for a tourist and getting lost in the haze of the streets. I am stuck with old people and night workers on their way to their evening shift in the city and i’m lucky to have a seat in the first place.

 

We have been together for about a year. That was after a series of phone calls and text messages and visits that no longer became associated with his interest in Karasuno and turned into something else more serious, more personal, meetings that demand awkward, heavy silences as he asks me if - I want to go to the movies, to the mall, to the park, to a cafe. Our first date involved a skateboard park and ice cream cones. Our second date was in shibuya. Our third date ended in my room when my mother and my brother were out to a party. He laid me down on my back and frantically kissed me like he was going to disappear, and I sank in the mattress under the weight of his affections. In the morning, I slept in his jersey as he left to take the first train back home.

 

New York is far away from Tokyo, a place across the sea and a time zone completely different from what i’m used to. The strain would probably test what we know of each other, how much we want to keep things as they are. As it stands, neither Kuroo nor I are making any moves in this relationship, both of us being too far away from each other to actually do something, and me fearing anything more permanent than a kiss. Sometimes Kuroo talks about moving together, or going to work in the same area, or something else, and my answer has always been the same: _I’m not ready. I’m not ready. I’m not ready._

 

It’s been almost a year since we’ve decided to be exclusive and I’m not ready either way, I keep fumbling on the words and assuring myself that what is happening is a natural course of things, the way people who’ve been together in high school break up in university because they - meet other people, find other interests, expand their horizons with a sense of exclusion and incision, people who become bitter and more mature as they move on with their lives - so they say - telling everyone else that love is a phase in your high school year as well, a mess of hormones and insecurity where anyone who so much as glances at you kindly becomes indebted to a form of commitment that allows you to call the other, _yours_ or _mine_. I’m not sure I agree, but from where I stand it simply doesn’t seem reasonable to ask a man to wait for someone who would probably never be able to make 9 pm trips to Tokyo anymore for the sake of wanting to see them, ever again. My fingers are cold and red from having agitated myself into thinking what I think would’ve been the right solution, but the truth is I have nothing and I am operating blindly in what I think is right, selfishly so, because in all honesty perhaps Kuroo would like someone else that would -

 

( The meeting was a distressing thing. I can’t remember whether I was even breathing when I told him of the news; Kuroo’s frustrated voice haunts me when I left - “Why didn’t you tell me sooner? What the hell do you mean, I should go? There are ways of making this work, Kei, you don’t have to go and burn all of your bridges before you leave and call it a day. You don’t get to come into my life and disappear without so much as a - ”

 

So maybe they’re right, after all, maybe it’s all just a phase and maybe good byes are a natural part of your high school life, where you leave your friends and your crushes at the door and call yourself mature as soon as you walk out of this era of your life and onto the next, with bits and pieces of who you were and what you have been broken off into jagged little shards, embedded into your mind. Someone tells Kuroo, “maybe he’s just not ready.” I don’t have the strength to tell them otherwise. By the time the last few months come into place I was ready to leave, terribly sorry, alone, and frightened. I suppose it’s not an exaggeration to say that the best memory I have of my high school is when i’d left it. )

 

 

 

**vi.**

Six years later, I’m in Manhattan drinking coffee and turning over a postcard in my fingers, with a single note on the back: _Reunion. You should come._

 

Ennoshita had kept in touch with me throughout my absence from Miyagi, even though he’s in Kyoto now, and as much as I tease him about his new Kansai accent, I am the one who is the foreigner. My Japanese is rough. My mother has noticed that my English is a lot better, though she tells me it’s no fault of mine; I’m not exactly in a place where our language is dominant anymore, and like that, I isolate myself once more.

 

A trip to Japan will cost me a bit over a thousand, far more than I can afford on my meagre salary of being a journalist, despite my beat being homicides, in addition to the number of people I would rather not see again: relatives, and friends included. I understand what coach Ukai meant when he said that he couldn’t return to Karasuno the first time he was asked by the teacher to come back, if only because nostalgia was too powerful of a drug and had saturated his pores every time he thinks of the school. That time has ended. And yet, he came back anyway, because he wanted to see how things were resolved in that rivalry between his friends that he’d left when he graduated, so he at least has a reason to come back regardless.

 

I don’t have the same convenience. If I return it’s only to visit Yamaguchi, who comes over to visit me regardless whenever he can. Underneath the invitation to the reunion, another note, this time in blue ink, in cramped block letters as if added later on: _Heard how you ended things. Not impressed. Could’ve done better._ And maybe it’s because it’s Ennoshita, a guy who I'm willing to go to lengths for if only because he’d do the same for me, that I’m considering a return anyway.

 

A lot of immigrants speak about the idea of home and going back, and how making the trip the second time around is more difficult than the first, where you feel more alienated by the return more than the act of leaving. Home is not a static phase. Language is not a static thing. I tried to think about how to make it from the airport all the way to home and find myself having to rely on second-hand information from my parents and the rest from the internet, and I keep wondering whether it matters to even try. My Japanese feels foreign in my tongue, and every time someone Japanese notices how I speak I feel even more ashamed at my slightly accented tone. It comes, I remind myself, from having moved places, but the difference in tone and language is still striking enough that being noticed hurts.

 

I think about Kuroo. In the time that I’ve left I’ve dated here and there, nothing too serious considering I’m more interested in having just enough cash to maintain my shitty apartment and my shittier diet. We have emailed each other maybe once during my entire stay here in the states and that was Kuroo who had emailed me out of the blue to wish me a happy eighteenth, which I spent sleeping in my apartment anyway because I was too broke at the time to even visit my parents. Life was a bit cruel that way, and Kuroo’s message made me wonder whether it was worth it burning everything back then, after all, when the end result was me staring at the ceiling at three am only in another time zone and in another room. I can’t say whether I’ve become more mature, I can certainly pay my bills and cook my food now, but I’m incapable of saying _sorry_ to a guy I used to dream about and hold hands with in the coldest of nights, so I suppose that makes me a coward.

 

I yell at a car trying to cut me off as I cross the street and make my way back to my apartment with dread. I would rather not return.

 

But even Orpheus turned at the sound of his lover’s voice, and so -

 

* * *

 

Miyagi after six years was so different in my return, full of streets and buildings I no longer recognize. I can afford to skip having to rent a hotel since my aunt has offered her guest room to me, but that was all the comfort I can remember from childhood. I don’t have plans to attend the reunion, but I meet up with Yamaguchi and Yachi who’re studying architecture in college, and they showed me a project they were both working on while I talk about the pieces I’ve published, my bylines and beat. Yachi asked me good questions about my job, my family, my perpetually small circle of friends. Yamaguchi hit me with a 2-by-4 verbally by asking me what the hell I was thinking when I left Kuroo in Tokyo, to which I replied, “I have no idea. At that time, I thought it was the most logical solution.”

 

“To what?”

 

“I don’t know.”

 

He doesn’t buy it. I’m a bad liar where my friends are concerned, and Yamaguchi just sighs while Yachi purses her lips because she also knows I’m not being entirely honest. She tells me, “he’s working in a company now.”

 

“Kuroo?”

 

“Yeah! He’s a junior stock broker.”

 

“God.”

 

“And he’s really good at what he does … He was in the Nekoma reunion, Hinata told me.”

 

Hinata was with Kozume and god knows what they were doing, but they seemed to be happier than I was, and that was irritating, like I should be doing something better.

 

It’s been six years. I reasoned to myself that there’s no way he’d remember or even want to look for me. His job - a vast change from the one he’d started with when we were going out together - presented me a very different image of Kuroo in my head than the one I was so used to. This Kuroo was different. He probably wears suits and comes to work at around 6.30 and leaves when the floor closes. He probably takes cigarette breaks and works round the clock. He probably wears a brand name watch and has a nice, sharp smile. His hair would probably be as unruly as it had been, but the most unfortunate thing I remember about his hair was how I liked running my hands through them when he sleeps, and I realize later that six years after I left i’m still in deep shit as I had been when I started.

 

Meeting Ennoshita later that week was no better. “You have an accent!”

 

“It’s what happens when you live overseas, dumbass. I can say the same to you too.”

 

“Hey, an English accent is not that bad, people have a tendency to think you’re more educated or rich than anything else.”

 

“How stupid. I still live on ramen, you know. Nothing has changed, the only difference is that I have an accent and a wardrobe to prevent people from thinking I’m poor and drowning in student loans.”

 

We’re drinking beer in a pub - theirs - and eating barbecue while catching up with each other. I've smoked my own pack, so Ennoshita offers me his own, and we end up talking until it’s about midnight and I’ve had enough beers to puke first thing in the morning in my hotel room in Kyoto. I don’t feel good. I haven’t felt at ease since I arrived in Japan and found myself more of a foreigner than anything else, catching up made me feel like I had to get to know who I was before and who my friends were before and who my friends are now; I am having trouble piercing together relationships and names, I am having trouble understanding slang, I am having trouble in general thinking about missed opportunities and apologies that should’ve come from my mouth years and years ago but are now stuck in the palm of my hands.

 

In a drunken haze I end up sending Kuroo a reply to his 'happy eighteenth birthday’ message that I should’ve sent anyway when I was eighteen, and stupidly, drunk tsukishima Kei had written, _congratulations on the job. If you don’t mind, I'd really like it if we could meet._

 

Only to be met with an electronic message in the morning, complete with professional signature, saying that Mr. Kuroo Tetsurou is currently not in the office, and I shut my laptop and nurse my headache instead as I burrow deep under the covers of my bed. _That’s cool_ , I think desperately. _I’ll just be here, perpetually embarrassed at my shit timing, except now I have three more weeks to stew on how I’ve fucked up._

 

 

 

**vii.**

Near the end of my third week in Japan, he emails me back -

 

_Hey. Sorry for not replying; got busy with work. If you got the time, come over to Tokyo. At – restaurant. Dinner. - KT._

 

I’m twenty-two and embarrassed at myself for being so elated at such a reply, but it’s better than silence, and so: time to move again.

 

* * *

 

I walk in to this diner dressed like I’m going for my job interview, the one time I remember being just as nervous as I am right now, except that I look a bit more fashionable in order to hide how distressed I actually am at the prospect of meeting him. Nowadays being a journalist whose beat happens to be homicides, very few things faze me. Except when meeting Kuroo Tetsurou, apparently, who’s come across with much more luck and opportunity than I ever have and therefore I immediately feel self-conscious about so many things, like how I have an awkward accent and I sort of wished I dyed my hair two shades darker than whatever it is I have going on right now, or I can just disappear like smoke into the Tokyo breeze. It’s 6.30 in the evening. Kuroo is at the patio drinking a beer and waving at me, his lithe fingers wrapped around a cigarette, and suddenly I’m fifteen and awkward again, looking at everywhere but his face, his smile.

 

“You wanna drink something? Beer? Cocktail?”

 

“Beer’s fine.” He hands me the menu, for which I am grateful for. It has not escaped me that he’s grown a lot wider around the shoulders, and suddenly I understand what makes people tweet about the universe shitting on them whenever they think of their exes. I used to think that that was a bit pitiful, but more and more I’m aching for the comfort of my phone to just type out something witty in lieu of having a decent conversation, something that has eluded me all these years where Kuroo is concerned …

 

( the waiter brings me the beer and I make my order of burgers and fries. )

 

It’s in that moment when I realize that almost all of the time nobody really knows what’s going on in their lives and people are just hoping that they fuck up less, especially when one more person is concerned.

 

Kuroo’s cigarette burns on his fingers. I light up mine, take a drag, sets it on the ash tray for a while. Lean back on my chair, while Kuroo watches me with a more controlled smile. “So, Tsukki.”

 

“First of all, I - ” I hesitate, only briefly, because hearing myself speak in this damned country is still an awkward exercise in getting to know my harsh Japanese, but whatever, I am not here to further torture myself with my insecurities, “- I owe you an apology. I left you in a shitty place back in my second year.”

 

“You did,” Kuroo agrees, without pause, and the honesty of his statement makes me flinch, betrays my hurt, which he notes but doesn’t comment on. “I was upset. For a while.”

 

“I never should’ve decided things by myself. I should’ve talked to you about my concerns. Instead, I - did what I did. That was irresponsible of me and I apologize.”

 

He takes a drink from his beer. Smiles. Leans forward, predatory, an arm propped over the table with his chin on the palm of his hand, his other hand brushing the ashes that linger on the other side of the table. My cigarette burns on the ash tray, and this is how we measure the awkwardness of the situation, my need to apologize versus his interests, which I can no longer gauge anymore. Six years was long enough to lose track of a man’s interests and needs; and this apology, as much as it is needed in the first place, is another introduction in the series of introductions I have done for myself, again and again, once I’ve returned home.

 

That was home, too; the idea of not having a stable home, a stable language, a stable person to come back to. The Kuroo in front of me could very well be doing this because he was curious; of that I have no doubts about, but I am here out of heartache and need, and it’s a desperation I can’t properly articulate because it’s not fair to burden him with something I’ve carried for six years when as far as he's concerned I’ve only come here to talk and apologize and drink beer and have a good time (?).

 

“No need to be so formal, Tsukki,” Kuroo says pleasantly. “That was almost half a decade ago - I was frustrated over the state of things. And I was real angry at one point, but - in the long run, moving has suited you better, hasn’t it?”

 

That was almost too neutral for my tastes; it must’ve shown in my face how I was gauging him again, as if we were in high school, and Kuroo laughs.

 

“You think I’m here to make you feel like shit.”

 

“You’d have every right to,” I grumbled.

 

“I wouldn’t say that,” Kuroo says with all seriousness. “I was in love with you. Even if I’m no longer your boyfriend - I don’t believe in treating people like shit just because things ended in a misunderstanding. And in all honesty - despite the, well, awkward way you handled things - I’m not interested in making things even worse than we left it back then, either.”

 

That was almost an opening. It made me hopeful. For once in this whole trip I feel the slightest bit of something sliding into place, like I have been waiting all my life to be dragged into a space where I could find a measure of peace, and in this busy patio in the slowly-gathering dark of Tokyo, Kuroo smiles at me as he gently pushes my beer to my hands, which has been sweating on the table in as much as my fingers have turned red again from how tightly I’ve been gripping the side of the table.

 

Kuroo takes a drag. The smoke makes him look so attractive. I am ready to be honest, if it means being able to hold his attention for a little while.

 

“So. What I wanna know, is whether you’d like to start over.”

 

“Start … over?”

 

“Or continue. However you want to call it. You be honest with me. I’ll be honest with you. The two of us find a way to make things work, slide into our own rhythms, and in the process remember what it’s like not to be so lonely.” He gives me a wan smile, and there’s pressure building at the back of my eyes because _oh_ , he knows, he understands. Maybe it’s the same for him as well, maybe he’s been waiting all his life to pick up this one last chord from a song-and-dance abruptly stilled from a time before because of our general awkwardness, and I think to myself, _god, yes._

 

“Alright,” I tell him. If I blink too much, it’s the smoke that’s blinding me. “I think that - that’s an excellent way to start things over.”

 

“Good.” Kuroo says. His face, that had been so cautiously polite in the beginning, breaks into a grin I’ve been so familiar with for the most of my childhood and it makes me shiver, makes my fingers feel too awkward as I reach over the table to hold on to my cigarette shakily like a lifeline, remembering how much I loved kissing the corner of his mouth. Six years had apparently not changed much in between the two of us, I am here and still in love, Kuroo is here and has been waiting and is desperately eager to start despite the distance he’s going to have to deal with, the time alone he’ll have to fight, the time zones he’ll have to wake up for. The whole thing has been a lesson on what not to do to fuck up your relationship from high school, as genuine and fleeting as certain emotions and attachments may have been; and now that we’re past that, we can go back to admiring each other’s strengths and gently setting our flaws right, complementing each other the way our fingers fit in each other’s as we held hands across the table. _I am sick of being alone_ , I tell myself. _I am sick of being out of love._

 

He tells me with such warmth, “it’s nice to see you again, Kei.”

 

I bury my face in my arm. I am too happy for words. It’s not a coincidence that I feel like crying. “It’s - nice to see you too, Tetsurou.”

 

 

 

 

end.

**Author's Note:**

> follow me in tumblr for [more krtsk fics.](http://fealle.tumblr.com/tagged/My-Fic)


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